Beautiful minds

LegoMachine1 built Beautiful minds:
"In honor of Sir Joseph Swan (1828-1914) and Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), the two men, which changed the way people live in homes around the world, inventing the incandescent light bulb. A bit of history: 'English Sir Joseph Wilson Swan in 1878 in Great Britain, patented the first light bulb ever made, but this, it proved impractical. The combustion system, was a thick filament carbon emitting gas, and very quickly, soot covered the interior of the bulb. Was then, the American Thomas Alva Edison, who in 1879 patented a high-strength thin filament, which did not emit gases. Swan also incorporated this improvement in his bulb, but was sued by Edison for patent infringement. In the end, common sense prevailed, Swan and Edison agreed, and in 1880, they created the Edison & Swan United Light Company. ..... and now light!"

Circuit board

Bruce Lowell (a different Bruce than me) made this amazing rendition of a circuit board.

Sextant

Matt Armstrong is doing a series of inventions and made this beautiful sextant. This instrument was first developed in 1757, and is used for measuring the angle between two distant objects - most importantly the horizon and a star. This can be used to calculate a ship's latitude, and was extremely important in helping ships navigate across oceans.

What hath God wrought?

During the early 1800's there were a series of inventions designed to transmit messages over wires, leading up to the point where Morse developed his telegraph (here in LEGO by Monsterbrick) in 1837. This was the first step of the telecommunications revolution that brought the world together, leading up to the internet today.

MRI

MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging, is based on the same principles as NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) (they changed the name out of concern that patients wouldn't come near something 'nuclear'). Hydrogen atoms have a very small magnetic moment. Normally, these magnetic moments are completely random and cancel out. When placed in a strong external magnetic field, these hydrogen nuclei align either with or against the external field. When these are pulsed with radio wave energy, the tiny atomic magnetic moments flip from low energy state, to high energy state, and then relax back to the low energy state. Since the body is full of water molecules, mapping out the location and density of these molecules (or, more properly, the hydrogen atoms in the H2O), doctors can get a peek inside your skin.